The Family, the Market or the State?

This book touches upon a few of the major challenges that all modern societies will have to face in the near future: how to set up a resilient pay-as-you-go pension system; whether the current balance between expenses and revenues in social expenditure is viable in the future, and, if not, what changes need to be introduced; whether the relative well-being of the current and future cohorts of the old will be preserved, and how their standards of living compare to those experienced by the old in the recent past.

At the micro level, the exchanges between generations are presented and discussed in detail: how they have evolved in the recent past in terms of time, money, co-residence and proximity, and what will likely happen next. The geographical scope is on the developed countries, plus South Korea.

A rich documentation of tables and graphs supports the scientific analyses and the policy implications in each of the nine chapters of this book, where demography, sociology, and economics intersect fruitfully, both at the macro and at the micro level.

• Ageing and policies
• Ageing in developed countries
• Demographic changes and fiscal sustainability
• Demographic changes and transfer systems
• Economic security in old age
• Economic well-being of baby-boomers
• Economic well-being of retirees
• Equity and sustainability
• Heterogeneous elderly parents
• Income and poverty among older Koreans
• Intergenerational transfers in Japan
• Low-income elderly
• Mutual support andd exchanges between generations
• Pension systems
• Quebec's public finances
• Relationship between public and family transfers
• Social norms and intergenerational relationships

• , Department of Statistics, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy

  Gustavo De Santis

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